


Scars

by Sunshine170



Category: Fringe
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-02
Updated: 2013-10-02
Packaged: 2017-12-28 05:17:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/988142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sunshine170/pseuds/Sunshine170
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the outside, they are always beautiful, together and apart, objects of aesthetic relief. The world sees them as a sum of sharp angles and features and pleasing builds, symmetrical, proportionate. What's on the inside is a different story altogether.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Scars

On the outside, they are always beautiful, together and apart, objects of aesthetic relief. The world sees them as a sum of sharp angles and features and pleasing builds, symmetrical, proportionate.

What's on the inside is a different story altogether…

She knows what she looks like. She's always known. Self-aware of the fact that she has blond hair and green eyes and a slender figure, which in combination may present a picture of conventional beauty to others. It's never particularly occurred to her to think any more of it than necessary, a genetic inheritance which she's thankful for, but not enamored with.

Beauty is a non-concern on good days and a down right inconvenience on the bad ones, something to be blunted by bland dress shirts and severe suits, to be put aside and disregarded when encountered with the cold and judgmental stares of the men she works with.

But beneath the veneer of flawlessness, hidden under layers of fabric, lies a garden of bruised skin and scars, of fading cuts and healing wounds, some which have been healing for years now, and new ones she acquires with too much frequency, glaring imperfections that stand out in the hazy light of a bedside lamp, or leap to sight in front of a full length mirror.

Imperfections that make her cringe.

It's not that she's ashamed or even vain…. Being self-absorbed about the way she looks serves very little purpose in her life and line of work.

It's just that she's never been able to wear them with pride, like warriors who brandish their war wounds.

That's never been her.

In her mind, there is absolutely nothing womanly or desirable about scars, no fucked up sentimentality about what are essentially markers of acts of violence done unto her body….

There is only one blemish which she's ever been able to look at without conflicted emotion, a thin, long stretch mark on the lower half of her left abdomen, a retainer from her pregnancy.

As far as she is concerned, it's the only scar behind which there's a story worth telling.

Peter has scars too, scars from fights of yore… ironically some wounds from encounters that never even transpired.

Mostly, his scars are always for her…. because of her, and she hates seeing them mar his skin the way they mar hers.

But sometimes when they lie together, skin against skin, she examines them carefully, committing each mark of excess to memory.

Charting them is like reading their life's story together, the ugly bruised reminders of the things that brought them together and pushed them closer and closer, forging bonds between them that they had never set out to make.

The first time she feels his eyes on him, exposed as she is in her underwear in a basement lab, after all of two days of familiarity transpiring between them, with her lover on a gurney in a coma nearby, she finds herself strangely coy of his subtle appraisal.

He doesn't stare… she'll have to give him credit for that. He doesn't eye the alabaster stretches of smooth, unblemished skin on display but scrutinizes gently, without a hint of disgust…. with too much concern for someone who pretended so much not to care, the violet patches of bruises and the scars that'll take months to heal. Even when he breaks her fall when she keels over woozy from the drugs and the smarting sensation of having a probe rammed into the back of her neck, and then helps her into the tank, she doesn't miss how he's careful to avoid any contact with her still sore to touch abrasions.

She loves him, not because he doesn't see her wounds, but because he doesn't unsee them. He kisses her tarnished skin much like he caresses her untarnished skin, like it was just another part of her body, no less or more desirable than the rest of her, not an unappealing hindrance to glaze over in quest of something more aesthetically pleasing, or even a site of display to be fetishized about.

The desire in his eyes is never in spite of her imperfections, but is for her, for everything that makes her who she is, the parts of her that are broken and bruised, battle hardened and jagged and the parts of her that are soft and beautiful and responsive and all woman.

The first time they make love, she tries to make light of it.

"I am sorry… everything's a little more banged up than you're probably used to." She says said regretting it almost immediately, when she sees the way his face falls.

She hadn't of course been thinking about _her,_  at least not when she was saying that, her mind instead troubled by images of the super model like women who had been in his bed before her _,_ but she knew what the implication of her words would sound like to him.

But he simply smiles, placing an innocent almost chaste kiss to her forehead. "You're a little more beautiful than what I am used to…"

"Peter… I didn't…"

"It's okay Olivia. It doesn't matter." He shrugs, pulling her hair to the side as he plants a kiss at her neck, looking at her with pure concern in the next moment. "Just, let me know….if I hurt you?"

"You could never hurt me." She shakes her head, kissing him before he could voice any more of his apprehension.

"You're beautiful…" he whispers in lust laden breaths, as his lips and hands move everywhere that night. " God, you're so beautiful…"

 _I want you…I want all of you_  he tells her in everything but words.

The morning after she finds him outside her apartment, she wakes up to find him studying her carefully in the sunlight streaming in from the shades, his eyes focused on her body, almost methodical in their scrutiny.

"What are you looking for?" She asks, puzzled by his intense gaze.

"Your scars… they're different." He says, his fingers tracing the smooth skin of her left hipbone where a thin jagged line ought to have been there, from when she had been hurled out of a car from an alternate universe.

"But I am still the same. I promise." She tells him with a soft smile, taking his hand in hers, worried perhaps he was doubting himself all over again "I just have new ones now."

He nods in understanding, kissing her.

"So do I."


End file.
